One of the great pleasures of visiting Japan is the chance to sleep in a futon, traditional Japanese bedding that’s freshly laid out on the floor every evening. When you’ve got a nice thick mattress pad, a fluffy, quilted duvet cover and a compact buckwheat pillow, a night sleeping on tatami straw floors is a night few foreigners forget.

Now you can share the traditional Japanese bedtime experience with your feline friends, with a gorgeous new range of futons created especially for the discerning four-legged customer. From the gorgeous Japanese prints to the matching pillow and the ergonomic, tail-friendly design, this is the best chance yet for obliging humans to finally reclaim their beds!

But before you run off to smother yourself with butter and startle donkeys by shouting the names of under-appreciated actors from the 1980s (hey, we don’t know what you do with your spare time), we have one little question to ask you: are Japanese futons awesome, or are they awful?

We all have our funny little habits and daily rituals. Some of us don’t feel settled at night unless we’ve put all the dishes away or spoken to our loved ones on the phone. Others can’t head to bed unless they’ve first checked that the front door is locked or whipped the shower curtain open to ensure there isn’t a monster, murderer, or acid-spitting xenomorph in there waiting climb out of the tub after they’ve fallen asleep.

But did you know that some people in Japan are now getting into the habit of putting their wallets to bed before themselves?

This futon, although technically meant for an iPhone (because Japan), is now home to a little hamster who seems to have found his new favorite spot. This has got to be the cutest case of theft we’ve ever seen!

The vicuña, for those of you had never heard of it before (guilty!), is, according to humanity’s savior Wikipedia, one of two wild South American camelids (you know, llama-like animals) living in the high alpine areas of the Andes. Its coat is said to produce the finest wool in the world. It also happens to be the most expensive for a variety of reasons, including that the animals will starve themselves to death if held in captivity, meaning they cannot be farmed, and shearing wild ones can only be done once every three years, and even then only about three pounds of the animal’s hair can be harvested.

So, I guess that explains why a seller on Amazon Japan was trying to offload what I am sure is a very nice futon quilt for 67,200,000 yen (about US$674K).

But is it worth the price? Well, there’s only one way to find out: time to call accounting for some cash and place an order.

It’s that time of the year again where many of us in Japan, where central heating never really took off, are operating a mouse in a very cold room. Heating takes place with space heaters, using kerosene or gas, or sometimes electric run heaters to warm one room at a time. If your computer is on the other side of the room from the heater, using a mouse and keyboard can become very unpleasant if you live in one of the colder parts of the country.

Well, now there is an answer to save you from your mouse hand freezing off: a hand futon! Read More